I first joined Wealthy Affiliate in June of 2016 mostly to just see what it was all about. I signed up for a free account at Wealthy Affiliate but upgraded to their paid Premium membership the very next day. After 7 months at Wealthy Affiliate, I decided it was finally time to write a Wealthy Affiliate review with my findings on whether this is a good program to sign up with or not.
23. Affiliates – There are many affiliate networks, such as FlexOffers and CJ Affiliate that allow you to promote other people’s products and services. You simply put a link or a banner on your page and then you get a percentage if someone clicks through and buys the product/service. You’ll want to select products that are specifically within your blog’s category.This is an effective way to earn money once you have the traffic coming to your blog.

Some useful advice there Marcus. It really is easy for anyone to set up a blog these days and there are many platforms to choose from. Of course WordPress itself is probably the most popular and not difficult to understand. I recently set up a few just for the backlink value and found that Strikingly was probably the most straightforward to set up. As I linked to my regular blog it was listed in Google within a few days. Totally free and as good if not better than the free websites that are dished out by WA. If you feel the need for community support, there are many groups on Facebook that won’t cost you a cent!

He didn't want me to write, but I just felt the need. So, here I am. No, I wasn't dumb enough to pay for it, but it seems that, unless you want to be a Wealthy Affiliate robot you are not welcome, and will be coaxed VERY tenderly into paying for it. In fact, I was told that the core of what I wanted to learn was in fact in the premium membership, lucky me! If I was some poor beginning I would've fallen, green money hard.
I left WA. I was lost. The first lesson is not as ‘beginner’ as it should be. Jargon isn’t explained, you need to research vocabulary separately. If you need to start at sesame st level computer info, you have NO IDEA what’s going on. The support is all very lovely but you can get 20 different answers to questions and not necessarily from experts. A great many also just use it as expensive Facebook. Often distracting Chit-chat is front and centre but you have to find lessons, The website is cluttered and overwhelming. It’s a swamp! I listened to most lessons twice as I found the info hard to catch, anything I learnt was just which button to push. I walk away none the wiser about affiliate marketing and webpage building. Nice community, good price but do some abc’s first
As for where I made the pyramid scheme analysis, it may be stretching it a bit far, but Investopedia says it well, “If the recruit gets 10 more people to invest, he or she will make a profit with just a small investment.” Sound a lot like getting a person to join Wealthy Affiliate, though I’d be fine if it was just a product and nothing else. Sure it may offer all of those resources like keyword research and hosting, but that’s just the bread of a hamburger, meaning the true “meat” of the program is the fact that it teaches you how to build an online “business” in which you are an affiliate for certain products. May even be a bit like MLM, but instead of the participants who recently joined receiving a smaller percentage of the money in which they got others to join (WA gives half, I’ll recognize that), they will still struggle in the end trying to build a website and generate traffics to have products bought through them in such a saturated market. Such reality cannot be downplayed in a review for Wealthy Affiliate.
These days, I think the hardest part of the SEO formula exists in the more technical aspects, i.e., good coding practices, site speed, site architecture, etc. Provided you have the desire and ability to write quality content, your time and money is better spent on learning the more technical nuances of SEO, which is why I recommend something like Treehouse over WA.
Thanks for the encouraging article. It helped remind me why I joined WA in the first place. Such a great community of people and opportunities. The growth of your success truly is limited only by how much work you want to put into it! It’s super cool that you have found so much success. I’ve only been a member for about a month so I’m excited to see what the future holds!